Andre Vacha
I'm a design technologist who brings philosophical inquiry and systems thinking to product design and engineering
I studied Data Science at Minerva University, where I lived in 5 cities (San Francisco, London, Berlin, Buenos Aires and Taipei) during my 4-year undergraduate.
I learned design through practice—first at Deepcore, SoftBank’s applied AI lab, then at the Roote Foundation, and finally at DeSci Labs, where I worked on tools for open science (academic search, collaborative peer review, and decentralized research publishing) and root-level systems change (a civic data dashboard and custom feed algorithms for Twitter) .
After quitting my job in 2024, my attention turned inward. For a year and a half, I maintained a daily meditation practice, and witnessed “mindfulness” grow from a curiosity and interest expressed as an aesthetic in my work into a way of being in the world. This inner shift has illuminated a critique of the many interfaces I live by - that they are designed to amplify distraction and dim presence, knowingly or unknowingly.
My work from 2024 onwards begins from that recognition. Beginning with pond, I’m exploring how software, hardware and systems can be in support of a conscious mode of being.
Influences
- Finding Radical Wholeness by Ken Wilbur
- Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield
- Ways of Being by James Bridle
- The User Condition by Silvio Lorusso
- The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin
themes: slow living, world building, tech criticism, design ethics, media ecologies, humane interfaces.
Inspirations
- are.na, a toolkit for assembling new worlds from the scraps of old ones
- kinopio, a spatial note taking tool for visually collecting and connecting your thoughts
- Modem Works, office for design and innovation with an end date
- dan-ball Powder Game (2006), a browser-based multiplayer physics simulator